w a man, at last, in
a shop, in whose window hung a paper of pins, a red handkerchief,
and two tea cans, a solitary, sedate apprentice, who leaned over
the counter and looked out through the open house door. He
certainly wrote that evening in his journal, if he kept one;
'To-day a traveller went through the town; the dear God may know
him, I do not!' The apprentice's face appeared to me to say all
that, and he had an honest face.

'In the tavern in which I entered, the same deathlike stillness
reigned as upon the street. The door was indeed closed, but in the
interior of the house all the doors stood wide open; the house cock
stood in the midst of the sitting room, and crowed in order to give
information that there was some one in the house. As to the rest,
the house was entirely picturesque; it had an open balcony looking
out upon the court--upon the street would have been too lively. The
old sign hung over the door and creaked in the wind; it sounded as
if it were alive. I saw it from my window; I saw also how the grass
had overgrown the pavement of the street. The sun shone clear, but
as it shines in the sitting room of the solitary old bachelor and
upon the balsam in the pot of the old maid, it was still as on a
Scottish Sunday, and it was Tuesday! I felt myself drawn to study
Young's 'Night Thoughts.'

'I looked down from the balcony into the neighbor's court; no
living being was to be seen, but children had played there; they
had built a little garden out of perfectly dry twigs; these had
been stuck into the soft earth and watered; the potsherd, which
served as watering pot, lay there still; the twigs represented
roses and geranium. It had been a splendid garden--ah yes! We
great, grown-up men play just so, build us a garden with love's
roses and friendship's geranium, we water it with our tears and our
heart's blood--and yet they are and remain dry twigs without roots.
That was a gloomy thought--I felt it, and in order to transform the
dry twigs into a blossoming Aaron's-staff, I went out. I went out
into the ends and into the long thread, that is to say, into the
little lanes and into the great street, and here was more life, as
I might have expected; a herd of cows met me, who were coming home,
or going away, I know not--they had no